Ezra Pound Quotes

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Quotes About Ezra Pound

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Good art however "immoral" is wholly a thing of virtue. Good art can not be immoral. By good art I mean art that bears true witness, I mean the art that is most precise. ~ Ezra Pound
Ezra Pound quotes by Ezra Pound
Music rots when it gets too far from the dance. Poetry atrophies when it gets too far from music. ~ Ezra Pound
Ezra Pound quotes by Ezra Pound
Yes, but bad language is bound to make in addition bad government, whereas good language is not bound to make bad government. That again is clear Confucius: if the orders aren't clear they can't be carried out. Lloyd George's laws were such a mess, the lawyers never knew what they meant. And Talleyrand proclaimed that they changed the meaning of words between one conference and another. The means of communication breaks down, and that of course is what we are suffering now. We are enduring the drive to work on the subconscious without appealing to the reason. They repeat a trade name with the music a few times, and then repeat the music without it so that the music will give you the name. I think of the assault. We suffer from the use of language to conceal thought and to withhold all vital and direct answers. There is the definite use of propaganda, forensic language, merely to conceal and mislead. ~ Ezra Pound
Ezra Pound quotes by Ezra Pound
Wars in old times were made to get slaves. The modern implement of imposing slavery is debt. ~ Ezra Pound
Ezra Pound quotes by Ezra Pound
See, they return; ah, see the tentative Movements, and the slow feet, The trouble in the pace and the uncertain Wavering! See, they return, one, and by one, With fear, as half-awakened; As if the snow should hesitate And murmur in the wind, and half turn back; ~ Ezra Pound
Ezra Pound quotes by Ezra Pound
As a bathtub lined with white porcelain, When the hot water gives out or goes tepid, So is the slow cooling of our chivalrous passion, O my much praised but-not-altogether-satisfactory lady. ~ Ezra Pound
Ezra Pound quotes by Ezra Pound
دختر

درختي به دستانم سبز شده,
شيره بر بازوانم جوشيده,
درخت در سينه‏ام شكفته --
سر به زير,
شاخه‏ها ,چون بازوان, از درونم مي‏بالند.

درخت هستي تو ,
خزه‌اي تو ,
بنفشه‏هايي كه باد در او مي‌پيچد,
كودكي هستي بلند بالا ,
و جهان اين همه را حماقت مي‌داند
::
A Girl

The tree has entered my hands,
The sap has ascended my arms,
The tree has grown in my breast--
Downward,
The branches grow out of me, like arms.

Tree you are,
Moss you are,
You are violets with wind above them.
A child -- so high -- you are,
And all this is folly to the world ~ Ezra Pound
Ezra Pound quotes by Ezra Pound
Love thou thy dream
All base love scorning,
Love thou the wind
And here take warning
That dreams alone can truly be,
For 'tis in dream I come to thee. ~ Ezra Pound
Ezra Pound quotes by Ezra Pound
I desired my dust to be mingled with yours
Forever and forever and forever. ~ Ezra Pound
Ezra Pound quotes by Ezra Pound
Every great change is simple. ~ Ezra Pound
Ezra Pound quotes by Ezra Pound
Things have ends (or scopes) and beginnings. To/ know what precedes and what follows will assist yr/ comprehension of process. ~ Ezra Pound
Ezra Pound quotes by Ezra Pound
Objectivity and again objectivity, and expression: no hindside-before-ness, no straddled adjectives (as "addled mosses dank"), no Tennysonianness of speech; nothing-nothing that you couldn't, in some circumstance, in the stress of some emotion, actually say. ~ Ezra Pound
Ezra Pound quotes by Ezra Pound
A little light, like a rushlight / to lead back to splendour. ~ Ezra Pound
Ezra Pound quotes by Ezra Pound
T.S. Eliot's influence was enormous on my generation. Much more than Ezra Pound. I actually had to put T.S. Eliot books out of the house because my poetry was so influenced. Everything I wrote sounded like Eliot. ~ Lawrence Ferlinghetti
Ezra Pound quotes by Lawrence Ferlinghetti
Artists are the antennae of the race. ~ Ezra Pound
Ezra Pound quotes by Ezra Pound
[On Ezra Pound:] A village explainer, excellent if you were a village, but if you were not, not. ~ Gertrude Stein
Ezra Pound quotes by Gertrude Stein
I think an alliance with Stalin's Russia is rotten. ~ Ezra Pound
Ezra Pound quotes by Ezra Pound
And I am homesick After mine own kind that know, and feel And have some breath for beauty and the arts. ~ Ezra Pound
Ezra Pound quotes by Ezra Pound
Any damn fool can be spontaneous. ~ Ezra Pound
Ezra Pound quotes by Ezra Pound
Someone - Cyril Connolly? Ezra Pound? - once said that anything that can be read twice is literature; I would say that anything that bears saying twice is quotable. ~ Joseph Epstein
Ezra Pound quotes by Joseph Epstein
No verse is libre for the man who wants to do a good job. ~ Ezra Pound
Ezra Pound quotes by Ezra Pound
The only thing one can give an artist is leisure in which to work. To give an artist leisure is actually to take part in his creation. ~ Ezra Pound
Ezra Pound quotes by Ezra Pound
The rustling of the silk is discontinued, Dust drifts over the courtyard, There is not sound of footfall, and the leaves Scurry into heaps and lie still, And she the rejoicer of the heart is beneath them: A wet leaf that clings to the threshold. ~ Ezra Pound
Ezra Pound quotes by Ezra Pound
And in the mean time my songs will travel,
And the devirginated young ladies will enjoy them
when they have got over the strangeness ~ Ezra Pound
Ezra Pound quotes by Ezra Pound
Early in his life Mr. [Ezra] Pound met with strong, continued, and unintelligent opposition. If people keep opposing you when you are right, you think them fools; and after a time, right or wrong, you think them fools simply because they oppose you. Similarly, you write true things or good things, and end by thinking things true or good simply because you write them ~ Randall Jarrell
Ezra Pound quotes by Randall Jarrell
This is no book. Whoever touches this touches a man. ~ Ezra Pound
Ezra Pound quotes by Ezra Pound
Yet the companions of the Muses
will keep their collective nose in my books
And weary with historical data, they will turn to my dance tune. ~ Ezra Pound
Ezra Pound quotes by Ezra Pound
Poetry is a sort of inspired mathematics, which gives us equations, not for abstract figures, triangles, squares, and the like, but for the human emotions. If one has a mind which inclines to magic rather than science, one will prefer to speak of these equations as spells or incantations; it sounds more arcane, mysterious, recondite.
~ Ezra Pound
Ezra Pound quotes by Ezra Pound
The thought of what America would be like
If the Classics had a wide circulation
Troubles my sleep (Cantico del Sole) ~ Ezra Pound
Ezra Pound quotes by Ezra Pound
'Tis the white stag, Fame, we're a-hunting, bid the world's hounds come to horn! ~ Ezra Pound
Ezra Pound quotes by Ezra Pound
Colloquial poetry is to the real art as the barber's wax dummy is to sculpture. ~ Ezra Pound
Ezra Pound quotes by Ezra Pound
A crowd pagan as ever imperial Rome was, eager, careless with an animal vigor unlike that of any European crowd that I ever looked at. ~ Ezra Pound
Ezra Pound quotes by Ezra Pound
Good writers are those who keep the language efficient. That is to say, keep it accurate, keep it clear. It doesn't matter whether the good writer wants to be useful, or whether the good writer wants to be harm. ~ Ezra Pound
Ezra Pound quotes by Ezra Pound
When the mind swings by a grass-blade
an ant's forefoot shall save you ~ Ezra Pound
Ezra Pound quotes by Ezra Pound
Some of my pictures are poem-like in the sense that they are very condensed, haiku-lik. There are others that, if they were poetry, would be more like Ezra Pound. There is a lot of information in most of my pictures, but not the kind of information you see in documentary photography. There is emotional information in my photographs. ~ Sally Mann
Ezra Pound quotes by Sally Mann
A man of genius has a right to any mode of expression. ~ Ezra Pound
Ezra Pound quotes by Ezra Pound
Poetry must be as well written as prose. ~ Ezra Pound
Ezra Pound quotes by Ezra Pound
Learn of the green world what can be thy place
In scaled invention or true artistry ~ Ezra Pound
Ezra Pound quotes by Ezra Pound
It is the business of the artist to make humanity aware of itself. ~ Ezra Pound
Ezra Pound quotes by Ezra Pound
What matters is not the idea a man holds, but the depth at which he holds it. ~ Ezra Pound
Ezra Pound quotes by Ezra Pound
Music begins to atrophy when it departs too far from the dance ... poetry begins to atrophy when it gets too far from music. ~ Ezra Pound
Ezra Pound quotes by Ezra Pound
The artist is always beginning. ~ Ezra Pound
Ezra Pound quotes by Ezra Pound
Art that sells on production is bad art, essentially. It is art that is made to demand. It suits the public. The taste of the public is bad. The taste of the public is always bad. It is bad because it is not an individual expression, but merely a mania for assent, a mania to be 'in on it'. ~ Ezra Pound
Ezra Pound quotes by Ezra Pound
A village explainer. Excellent if you were a village, but if you were not, not.
(on Ezra Pound) ~ Gertrude Stein
Ezra Pound quotes by Gertrude Stein
When you start searching for 'pure elements' in literature you will find that literature has been created by the following classes of persons:

Inventors. Men who found a new process, or whose extant work gives us the first known example of a process.

The masters. Men who combined a number of such processes, and who used them as well as or better than the inventors.

The diluters. Men who came after the first two kinds of writer, and couldn't do the job quite as well.

Good writers without salient qualities. Men who are fortunate enough to be born when the literature of a given country is in good working order, or when some particular branch of writing is 'healthy'. For example, men who wrote sonnets in Dante's time, men who wrote short lyrics in Shakespeare's time or for several decades thereafter, or who wrote French novels and stories after Flaubert had shown them how.

Writers of belles-lettres. That is, men who didn't really invent anything, but who specialized in some particular part of writing, who couldn't be considered as 'great men' or as authors who were trying to give a complete presentation of life, or of their epoch.

The starters of crazes.
Until the reader knows the first two categories he will never be able 'to see the wood for the trees'. He may know what he 'likes'. He may be a 'compleat book-lover', with a large library of beautifully printed books, bound in the most luxurious bindings, ~ Ezra Pound
Ezra Pound quotes by Ezra Pound
Compose in the sequence of the musical phrase, not in sequence of a metronome. ~ Ezra Pound
Ezra Pound quotes by Ezra Pound
Use no superfluous word, no adjective, which does not reveal something. Don't use such an expression as 'dim land of peace.' It dulls the image. It mixes an abstraction with the concrete. It comes from the writer's not realizing that the natural object is always the adequate symbol. Go in fear of abstraction. ~ Ezra Pound
Ezra Pound quotes by Ezra Pound
A slave is one who waits for someone else to free him. ~ Ezra Pound
Ezra Pound quotes by Ezra Pound
I have tried to write Paradise
Do not move
Let the wind speak
that is paradise.
Let the Gods forgive what I
have made
Let those I love try to forgive
what I have made. ~ Ezra Pound
Ezra Pound quotes by Ezra Pound
Discoveries are made by gluttons and addicts. The man who forgets to eat and sleep has an appetite for fact, for interrelations among causes. ~ Ezra Pound
Ezra Pound quotes by Ezra Pound
2 young ladies to sing us the new liberty song
readiness to be shot / versus / taxes ~ Ezra Pound
Ezra Pound quotes by Ezra Pound
It is difficult to write a paradiso when all the superficial indications are that you ought to write an apocalypse. ~ Ezra Pound
Ezra Pound quotes by Ezra Pound
When two men in business always agree, one of them is unnecessary. ~ Ezra Pound
Ezra Pound quotes by Ezra Pound
Separation on the River Kiang KO-JIN goes west from Ko-kaku-ro, The smoke-flowers are blurred over the river. His lone sail blots the far sky. And now I see only the river, The long Kiang, reaching heaven. Taking ~ Ezra Pound
Ezra Pound quotes by Ezra Pound
I ask a wreathwhich will not crush my head.
And there is no hurry about it;
I shall have, doubtless, a boom after my funeral,
Seeing that long standing increases all things
regardless of quality. ~ Ezra Pound
Ezra Pound quotes by Ezra Pound
When modernist poetry, or what not so long ago passed for modernist poetry, can reach the stage where the following piece by Mr. Ezra Pound is seriously offered as a poem, there is some justification for the plain reader and orthodox critic who shrinks from anything that may be labelled 'modernist' either in terms of condemnation or approbation ... Better he thinks, that ten authentic poets should be left for posterity to discover than one charlatan should be allowed to steal into the Temple of Fame. ~ Laura Riding
Ezra Pound quotes by Laura Riding
A people that grows accustomed to sloppy writing is a people in process of losing grip on its empire and on itself. ~ Ezra Pound
Ezra Pound quotes by Ezra Pound
When one thinks of all the people who support or have supported Fascism, one stands amazed at their diversity. What a crew! Think of a programme which at any rate for a while could bring Hitler, Petain, Montagu Norman, Pavelitch, William Randolph Hearst, Streicher, Buchman, Ezra Pound, Juan March, Cocteau, Thyssen, Father Coughlin, the Mufti of Jerusalem, Arnold Lunn, Antonescu, Spengler, Beverley Nichols, Lady Houston, and Marinetti all into the same boat! But the clue is really very simple. They are all people with something to lose, or people who long for a hierarchical society and dread the prospect of a world of free and equal human beings. Behind all the ballyhoo that is talked about 'godless' Russia and the 'materialism' of the working class lies the simple intention of those with money or privileges to cling to them. Ditto, though it contains a partial truth, with all the talk about the worthlessness of social reconstruction not accompanied by a 'change of heart'. The pious ones, from the Pope to the yogis of California, are great on the' change of heart', much more reassuring from their point of view than a change in the economic system. ~ George Orwell
Ezra Pound quotes by George Orwell
Great literature is simply language charged with meaning to the utmost possible degree. ~ Ezra Pound
Ezra Pound quotes by Ezra Pound
Either move or be moved. ~ Ezra Pound
Ezra Pound quotes by Ezra Pound
I had written my master's thesis on Ezra Pound on 'The Cantos.' And don't ask me about it. I don't remember anything about it. ~ Sally Mann
Ezra Pound quotes by Sally Mann
The jargon of sculptors is beyond me. I do not know precisely why I admire a green granite female, apparently pregnant monster with one eye going around a square corner. ~ Ezra Pound
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Better mendacities Than the classics in paraphrase! Some quick to arm, some for adventure, some from fear of weakness, some from fear of censure, some for love of slaughter, in imagination, learning later ... some in fear, learning love of slaughter; Died some, pro patria, non "dulce" non "et decor" . walked eye-deep in hell believing in old men's lies, the unbelieving came home, home to a lie. ~ Ezra Pound
Ezra Pound quotes by Ezra Pound
The artist is always beginning. Any work of art which is not a beginning, an invention, a discovery is of little worth. ~ Ezra Pound
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You have to hammer yourself into an artist. ~ Ezra Pound
Ezra Pound quotes by Ezra Pound
O woman shapely as a swan,
Your gunmen tread on my dreams ~ Ezra Pound
Ezra Pound quotes by Ezra Pound
Don't imagine that the art of poetry is any simpler than the art of music, or that you can please the expert before you have spent at least as much effort on the art of verse as the average piano teacher spends on the art of music.
Be influenced by as many great artists as you can, but have the decency either to acknowledge the debt outright, or try to conceal it.
Don't allow "influence" to mean merely that you mop up the particular decorative vocabulary of some one or two poets who you happen to admire. ~ Ezra Pound
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I found after seventy years that I was not a lunatic but a moron ... I should have been able to do better. ~ Ezra Pound
Ezra Pound quotes by Ezra Pound
Properly, we should read for power. ~ Ezra Pound
Ezra Pound quotes by Ezra Pound
Poetry is a language pared down to its essentials. ~ Ezra Pound
Ezra Pound quotes by Ezra Pound
Be not cheap or mediocre in desiring. ~ Ezra Pound
Ezra Pound quotes by Ezra Pound
I dunno what my 23 infantile years in America signify. I left as soon as motion was autarchic
I mean my motion. ~ Ezra Pound
Ezra Pound quotes by Ezra Pound
Where the dead walked
and the living were made of cardboard. ~ Ezra Pound
Ezra Pound quotes by Ezra Pound
Nothing matter but the quality/ of the affection - /in the end - that has carved the trace in the mind dove sta memoria ~ Ezra Pound
Ezra Pound quotes by Ezra Pound
Yr/ humanity counterfeit
yr/ liberty cankered with simulation
~ Ezra Pound
Ezra Pound quotes by Ezra Pound
I believe in some parts of Nietzsche,
I prefer to read him in sections;
In my heart of hearts I suspect him
of being the one modern christian;
Take notice I never have read him
except in English selections. ~ Ezra Pound
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Of course when one opens a coffin, one destroys it. Nevertheless a delicate odour of cedarwood will come forth. ~ Miguel Serrano
Ezra Pound quotes by Miguel Serrano
Another struggle has been the struggle to keep the value of a local and particular character, of a particular culture in this awful maelstrom, this awful avalanche toward uniformity. The whole fight is for the conservation of the individual soul. The enemy is the supression of history; against us is the bewildering propaganda and brainwash, luxury and violence. Sixty years ago, poetry was the poor man's art: a man off on the edge of the wilderness, or Frémont, going off with a Greek text in his pocket. A man who wanted the best could have it on a lonely farm. Then there was the cinema, and now television. ~ Ezra Pound
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The critic who doesn't make a personal statement, in remeasurements he himself has made, is merely an unreliable critic. He is not a measurer but a repeater of other men's results. KRINO, to pick out for oneself, to choose. That's what the word means. ~ Ezra Pound
Ezra Pound quotes by Ezra Pound
The artist is the antenna of the race. ~ Ezra Pound
Ezra Pound quotes by Ezra Pound
I guess the definition of a lunatic is a man surrounded by them. ~ Ezra Pound
Ezra Pound quotes by Ezra Pound
The Lake Isle
O God, O Venus, O Mercury, patron of thieves,
Give me in due time, I beseech you, a little tobacco-shop,
With the little bright boxes
piled up neatly upon the shelves
And the loose fragrant cavendish
and the shag,
And the bright Virginia
loose under the bright glass cases,
And a pair of scales not too greasy,
And the whores dropping in for a word or two in passing,
For a flip word, and to tidy their hair a bit.
O God, O Venus, O Mercury, patron of thieves,
Lend me a little tobacco-shop,
or install me in any profession
Save this damn'd profession of writing,
where one needs one's brains all the time. ~ Ezra Pound
Ezra Pound quotes by Ezra Pound
To say that a state cannot pursue its aims because there is no money, is like saying that an engineer cannot build roads, because there are no kilometers. ~ Ezra Pound
Ezra Pound quotes by Ezra Pound
The flavors of the peach and the apricot are not lost from generation to generation. Neither are they transmitted by book learning. ~ Ezra Pound
Ezra Pound quotes by Ezra Pound
The history of an art is the history of masterwork, not of failures, or mediocrity. ~ Ezra Pound
Ezra Pound quotes by Ezra Pound
What counts is the cultural level ~ Ezra Pound
Ezra Pound quotes by Ezra Pound
If anybody ever shuts you in Indiana ... and you don't at least write some unconstrained something or other, I give up hope for your salvation. ~ Ezra Pound
Ezra Pound quotes by Ezra Pound
A nation which neglects the perceptions of its artists declines. After a while it ceases to act, and merely survives.
There is probably no use in telling this to people who can't see it without being told. ~ Ezra Pound
Ezra Pound quotes by Ezra Pound
Usury is the cancer of the world, which only the surgeon's knife of fascism can cut out of the life of the nations. ~ Ezra Pound
Ezra Pound quotes by Ezra Pound
There are few things more difficult than to appraise the work of a man suddenly dead in his youth; to disentangle promise from achievement; to save him from that sentimentalizing which confuses the tragedy of the interruption with the merit of the work actually performed. ~ Ezra Pound
Ezra Pound quotes by Ezra Pound
The Sea of Glass
I looked and saw a sea
roofed over with rainbows,
In the midst of each
two lovers met and departed;
Then the sky was full of faces
with gold glories behind them ~ Ezra Pound
Ezra Pound quotes by Ezra Pound
Gloom and solemnity are entirely out of place in even the most rigorous study of an art originally intended to make glad the heart of man. Gravity, a mysterious carriage of the body to conceal the defects of the mind. ~ Ezra Pound
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More writers fail from lack of character than from lack of intelligence. ~ Ezra Pound
Ezra Pound quotes by Ezra Pound
And the days are not full enough
And the nights are not full enough
And life slips by like a field mouse
Not shaking the grass ~ Ezra Pound
Ezra Pound quotes by Ezra Pound
Speak against unconscious oppression,
Speak against the tyranny of the unimaginative,
Speak against bonds. ~ Ezra Pound
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Till now they send him dreams and no more deed;
So doth he flame again with might for action,
Forgetful of the council of the elders,
Forgetful that who rules doth no more battle,
Forgetful that such might no more cleaves to him
So doth he flame again toward valiant doing. ~ Ezra Pound
Ezra Pound quotes by Ezra Pound
Bureaucrats are a pox. They are supposed to be necessary. Certain chemicals in the body are supposed to be necessary to life, but cause death the moment they increase beyond a suitable limit ~ Ezra Pound
Ezra Pound quotes by Ezra Pound
There is something so degrading - at least, one would think that there were something so degrading in the practice of writing as a trade - that anyone who has once earned a livelihood, or part of it, obviously and openly, by popular writing, can never be seriously regarded by any great number of people. And then, of course, "he does too much. ~ Ezra Pound
Ezra Pound quotes by Ezra Pound
End rhymes are not enough. Every word-sound in a poem should find an echo in another, neighbouring word's sound to achieve what Ezra Pound called melopoeia. (This is something like what the Welsh call Cynghanned.) ~ Anne Stevens
Ezra Pound quotes by Anne Stevens
Rhythm must have meaning. ~ Ezra Pound
Ezra Pound quotes by Ezra Pound
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